ABSTRACT
All parents, across different socioeconomic status (SES) and ethnic groups, have aspirations that their children succeed in school.1 A copious body of quantitative and qualitative evidence shows that a major predictor of elementary and secondary students’ school success is the degree of their parents’ engagement in schooling. A sine qua non in educational discourse is that the greater parents get involved in their children’s schooling, the more successful their offspring will be-particularly in the improvement of academic achievement and the fostering of favorable attitudes toward learning. In this chapter, we cover the following: (a) the value of parental involvement in education; (b) the myth of Chicano parental noninvolvement in education; (c) standard perceptions and misunderstood complexities of Chicano parental involvement; (d) unaccounted complexities of Chicano parental involvement; (e) bridging the home-school gap.
